Isobel Campbell seems to be making the most of her post Belle & Sebastian music making days. Exploring different sides of herself and collaborating with a range of artists. After her recent outings with Mark Lanegan she now takes off the boots and and handkerchief and trades them in for some dim light, red wine and her take on some lesser know Billy Holiday gems. Bill Wells, a great piano player who has released some great records on Geographic as well as Leaf lays down the keys, guitar and some tasteful electronics that allow Campbell's totally enticing voice to create the tender mood that these songs call for. Like the best kind of covers these songs use just a skeleton of the original's in making something that stand's on its own while bowing gracefully to legacy of Billie Holiday. This recording was actually made a few years ago and was pretty much impossible to get hands on but luckily it has finally been made available. This melts so deliciously!
Werewolf are a mysterious Polish horde who specialize in murky, brittle, lo fi grimness a la their countrymen Graveland. Huge guitars swirl and buzz, the rhythms veer from seasick waltzes to buzzing blackened blasts, thick walls of guitarfuzz and swirls of chaotic ambience create a dense foresty murk, where drums pulse and throb way down in the mix, like tribal war chants barely heard drifting like the stench of death on the wind. The vocals are a growling gargle, another layer of buzz in Werewolf's chaotic sonic squall, the cymbals splash and shimmer like acid rain eating away at everything it touches. This is more of that glorious loping buzzy droning black metal we can never seem to get enough of. The mix is so thick and overblown that the riffs eventually blur and smear, the whole record becoming a super buzzy trancelike drone. Awesome.
Keith Fullerton Whitman made his way down to Australia in early 2006, showcasing his DSP-folklore collision of pastorally painted ambience, jump-cut drill 'n' bass rhythms, electronic esoterica, and a knack for Swedish prog riffs just for kicks. As a treat for his Antipodean audience, Whitman composed a piece which reworked an older track which clocked in at 10:32, doubling it to 21:04 and also re-composing the source material to be what Whitman qualifies as "bi-directional, meaning that it plays the same forwards as backwards," in other words, a palindrome (and what a fun word that is!). This plaintive reworking of drone-poetry for drifting bass rattle, rounded percolations of modular tone, and whisps of timbral trickery would have been a tour-only cd had it not been for Lawrence English convincing Whitman to release it through his Room 40 imprint. An elegant and thoughtful abstraction of digital post-ambience that more than lives up to the high standards of Whitman's previous albums!
It's new Wire time so you know what that means! Current 93 on the cover. Inside Die Todliche Doris, Annea Lockwood, Boxcutter, FM3 (responsible for the beloved Buddha Machine), an "Invisible Jukebox" with Kode9, "Global Ear" on Belgium, and as always loads and loads of reviews: records, books, shows, artshows, and more and more!
We've become a bit obsessed with French black metal. Who can blame us? France has been producing an inordinate number of furiously fucked up grim black metal outfits. Just off the top of our heads, Deathspell Omega, Spektr, Blut Aus Nord, Seth, Mutiilation, S.V.E.S.T., Eikenskaden, Ad Hominem, Glorior Belli, Arkhon Infaustus, but a quick look at Encyclopedia Metallium online shows almost 2,000 black metal hordes lurking throughout the French countryside.
And now we add to the list Wolok. Who follow in the damned and demented footsteps of their countrymen in Spektr and Blut Aus Nord, by taking a grim black metal buzz and turning it inside out, bending and distorting and tearing it apart only to put the pieces back together again, adding all sorts of non metal weirdness to come up with a truly twisted piece of black art.
The core of Wolok's sound is indeed a grim and harsh buzzing blackness. But that grimness is surrounded by a dizzying swirl of damaged drones, serene passages of dark ambience, strange choral hymns, chopped up and reassembled into stuttering vocal landscapes, everything drenched in all sorts of alien FX. But this is not just some buzzing black metal record with 'trippy' sound effects, no every single part that makes up the actual songs, is equally damaged and diseased, riffs twist and tangle, slippery and impossibly convoluted. Almost like black metal played on a slide guitar, strange notes float from within dark clouds of metallic blackness, over the top a glistening shimmer of sparkling electronics and jagged shards of feedback screech, a noisy, psychedelic sheen laid over the grim blackness below. Some riffs splinter into strange dirgey chugs, creeping doomscapes of downtuned crunch and haunting found sounds, deep drones swirl around processed vocals and mournful guitar figures. Some strange mix of Abruptum, Burzum and Blut Aus Nord, a murky, lo-fi buzzscape, peppered with cinematic ambience and caustic white noise fuzz, while buried in the mix, blurry blasting drum freakouts, and a motley collection of vocals and voices, screeching demons, gurgling monsters, rumbling spoken word, ultra distorted growls, all just more blurry swirl to mix into Wolok's chaotic black blast. Definitely a new favorite far out black metal around here.
And if the music wasn't enough, the Wolok manifesto let's you know what you're in for, in no uncertain terms:
"Wolok appeared in 2003 to unveil the truth about existence.
Wolok exclusively spreads hate and scorn towards human filth.
Wolok supports your depression and despair.
Wolok mocks your miserable way of living.
Wolok appreciates the smell of your putrefying carrion.
Wolok urges putrid scum to self-destruction.
Wolok is absurd.
Wolok never existed and will never exist.
Wolok deals with musical vermin.
Wolok is as futile as the sum of 6 billion lives.
Wolok wants you dead."
LIMITED TO 541 COPIES. Killer creepy artwork too!
When we first heard about Worms Of Sabnock, a grim TRUE black metal band from the UK, they were being touted as sounding exactly like Nattens Madrigal-era Ulver, which it ended up was not actually all that accurate, but what they did end up sounding like was even more exciting. There are definitely some of those elements present, super brittle buzzing insect-like riffing, thrashing broken bone blast beats, but the vocals are much more over the top, a growly shriek much closer to Cradle Of Filth's Dani Filth. In fact the band has quite a bit of overblown instrumental bombast also quite reminiscent of the Filthies. Big washes of keyboards, weird haunting clean vocal croon, and angelic female choral parts. But the best part would have to be the flute. That's right, the FLUTE. We almost fell out of our chairs when this flute came swooping in, fluttering and flitting over a grinding blasting black buzz, so totally unlikely, but so fucking perfect.
Farther into the record it gets even stranger, with several lilting tranquil folk interludes, rife with dreamy flute and softly strummed acoustic guitar, some blown out droney murky sort-of-post-rock with sweetly crooned clean vocals, almost chant like, mixed in with streaks of utter grim blackness. Definitely a confusional mix, but it somehow works. A tripped out, grim and frosty, psychedelic black metal journey through a world of Worms and Dark Harmonies. With flutes!!
Super over the top packaging, with the band sporting seriously gruesome corpsepaint, splattered with blood and festering wounds, one band member is even sporting horns that appear to have pushed messily through the front of his head, streams of blood pouring into his eyes. Cool.
Wow, not just a new Hammers Of Misfortune album this week but also a new Zebulon Pike! Two what we might call "advanced metal" bands that don't really have anything to do we each other, except a) they both slay and b) that we first heard about Zebulon Pike after Hammers came back from a tour raving about this kick-ass instrumental metal band they'd played with in Minneapolis. Epic length songs, dual-guitar harmonies left right and center, and HEAVY was the word from the Hammers camp. ZP's first album, 2004's And Blood Was Passion, proved all this and more to us, and we've been eagerly awaiting another one since then! As we're sure a lot of you have been too, 'cause that first Zebulon disc has been a steady seller here, people totally going for what we described as their blend of the math-rock, post-rock instru-metal prowess of both The Fucking Champs and Pelican. (And what we will -again- describe as a blend of those two bands!)
ZP II: The Deafening Twilight is just what we wanted: still no singing, five more head-banging, mind-blowing tracks (one just five minutes long, two around thirteen, and the other two of 'em upwards of 20 minutes in length) of sheer shut up n' play stoner riff mastery, post-rock dynamics of beauty and might gone totally metal, as many twists and turns as a Pacific Coast drive on Highway 1, convoluted yet catchy and melodic... and again, damn HEAVY when the pedal's to the metal. They can thrash violently or go for pretty and quiet, even breaking out instruments like vibraphone, tubular bells, and medieval greatpipes when their compositions demand 'em. Furthermore, they're shredders but this doesn't come off as techy and complex for the sake of it like, say, Behold The Arctopus. It's more "classic" and song-centric. And way more metal than some of their instrumental peers. I mean, we do love Pelican, but are they metal enough to title a song "(Behold) The Wizzard's Fountain"?? ZP'd fit right in on a bill with The Sword or Baroness. Recommended.
